The evolving DLA landscape
When I first coined the phrase ‘digital lifestyle aggregator’ - I was forced to find a better term than “Server-in-the-Closet” - which is what I HAD been using to describe this new era of computing. It combines on-line and off-line usage, adapts to your needs, both professionally and personally and would bridge and connect together the worlds of TVs, PCs, game machines and telephone (in all makes and guises.)
Hearing about Microsoft’s new Home Server brings this whole story back to its roots, as we’re finally getting to the point where Dave Winer’s original vision of desktop servers is coming true.
It was Frontier that blew me away in the mid-90’s - and which I spent many years trying to build on top of. That’s why I convinced Paolo to use it. But I knew we needed broadband (for video and audio and huge pages), rich media interfaces (which is what we called Ajax and Laszlo back then), openness (standards, data, applications and marketplaces) and user-centric Digital ID (OpenID, FOAF, XFN, etc.) for this ‘whole thing’ to suceed.
Well now all those factors and dependencies have arrived and we’re seeing a new kind of Portals 2.0 emerge.
And there are all sorts of defintions, personifications and exemplary deployments of this vision - which keeps things interesting. As Mike Butcher writes in his ‘clarification’ of an earlier post:
My two Euros worth on this subject is that I think the companies that have a strategy based on user control really have the edge here. Back in Web 1.0 there was very little ability to control what was published to the whole web and what was not. You either published something or you didn’t. Today those controls are available, and this is creating a sort of ‘porous web’ where some things are shared between blogs, DLAs etc and some are not.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the growing band of widget companies out there, because commonly when you get a widget for your site, you don’t have much - or any, usually - control on who or where the content you are sharing can be shared.
I acutally consider Widgets and Dashboards to be key component of DLAs. They represent the componetization of the web and are a clear tool for connecting different services and content channels together.
So then if you look and products like NetVibes and PageFlakes - they are in fact - DLAs of a different kind.
SixApart even has two kinds of DLAs being sold by the same company; VOX and LiveJournal.
Then there are the big boys who see their ’start pages’ evolving into NetVibes like aggregators. Well in fact, these start pages are glorified profile pages - and anoehr nagle on DLAs. But there rae oteh rangles - as well.
Aggregation of IM and video links, mobile gateways and Home Media platforms, social media sites with attitude - they’re ALL DLAs. And god bless them for it. Now we need to get OpenID adopted, and especially the ‘attribute exchange inside of OpenID2.
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